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"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

Unofficial Big Ten Logo Dance-Off

I have weathered all the submissions and whittled them down to a plausible few. Many submissions either unwisely tried to shoehorn a 2 into the design, adopted the horrifying your-printer-is-out-of-ink cyan, or were not better than the New Coke logo. I ruthlessly cut those.

Our four candidates:

Brian Choi

Anthony Tscherne

Fuzzy247

Yes, this is just the BTN logo minus "network" and with an extra star, but it's included because 1) it makes sense and 2) points out what a weird lack of cohesion there is between the two new marks.

I know the art work isn't the best, but give me a break; I’m not that Photoshop guy. I think the idea is great, so I hope anyone out there who is more artistically capable would be able to run with this and reply. The better part here, I feel, is also the story behind the idea:

It’s Saturday, November 6th, and I am at Matilda's (the greatest Michigan bar in Chicago) with some friends watching the most exciting game of the season. At halftime, my friends and I are a pretty hammered, and I have the bright idea that we should try and come up with a new logo for the Big Ten right there at the bar. So I grab some bar napkins and some pens, and challenge everyone that the worst logo has to buy the next round. After much frustration, I jot down this masterpiece - like last supper type masterpiece. Yeah, I’m hammered, so of course I think I’ve got skills like Da Vinci, but when I looked at the napkin the next day, I was still mildly impressed. Below are the original napkin and a cleaned up version. Anyone have Delany's email?

I think that Brian had a lot of great ideas with his logo, but it looks a little bit too hardwired for football-only use, as the hash marks look like threads on a football. Tweaked a little bit with this one, might add something. Extended the lines through the letters, thought about weaving them, but didn't. Also added logos.

As always, work in progress. But it made for a fun hour.

Here's another version — and yes, I do realize that I had the divisions backward, and that can be fixed soon, but they'll hopefully be given the heave-ho soon anyway.

Any of the ones offered up here are better than that fuggly thing the Big Ten spat out (did they actually pay somebody to come up with that crap??)

Anyway, I really like the shield logo, especially the one where the school logo's were moved up so they were positioned along the bottom edges of the shield.

The Big Ten is a conundrum wrapped in a cabbage leaf. Every once in a while they make a move that you can honestly say was brilliant, but more often than not they come up with these half assed ideas that look like they were put together over a 20 martini lunch.

I work in advertising so I follow a lot of design and advertising blogs in addition to this one. Knowing how much the MGoBlog community hated the new Big Ten logo you can imagine how funny it was to read this article with just-short-of-effusive praise for the design. Read it here.

I think the basic idea is excellent, but something about the combination of colors & textures immediately made me think of a game I'd see in a store that caters to the "I love painting little figurines of orcs" crowd.

Phineas: Removing prepositions makes it more condescending.

The BTN-derived one is excellent - clean, and it matches what we have already. (The stacked version posted in the comments looks even better.)

The shield logo (with the school logos moved up to directly underneath) is great. And both can be tweaked to school colors (not as easily with the shield; you'd have to go with light and dark variations of the main color along with the lighter secondary color - for Michigan you'd just change the text to yellow and maybe a slightly different shade of blue, MSU would do dark green and light green background, etc.).

The first one would look great if we were a football-only conference, but it wouldn't really look right for basketball or anything else.

All three are infinitely better than the piece of crap we actually got.

it's amazing how much better ALL THREE of them are compared to what was chosen. Shields in logos are kind of cliche' but it looks nice. The first one is great for football. And the 3rd one really does make more sense than anything.

Are/were most people opposed to change of the conference name? I personally wouldn't have minded a change to the Big North Conference or something to that effect. I realize most are probably attached to the history of the Big Ten but I'd much rather have a name change than the current abomonation of a logo.

Great that it evokes the laces of the football. But I also like the numeral 2 sort of hidden in the elongated s, as well as the imagery of railroad tracks; I envision haulers of coal or ore or grain moving through the Big Ten geography.

"True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise --- the other, loyalty."

I created it. Wasn't paying attention to the blog yesterday afternoon though, otherwise I would have reposted. Thanks for doing so WolverineWill. I just wanted to make people laugh...which apparently worked as I got something ridiculous like 112 posbangs. Too bad that Brian could only post serious logos, though. Oh well.

I realize I'm too late with this and that it's very poorly crafted, but I had an idea about an hour ago and threw this together on paint. I figured if the pac10 could use mountains and waves, we should use corn and waves. So here it is, a corn stalk where the husk is replaced by waves that form a B and G around the corn that is the I. Then the 10 in there. I would need someone with a ton more artistic ability to clean it up and make the waves on the left look more like a B. That's my contribution to society...

I thought his looked sharp too, but IMO those hash marks resemble the laces on a football. If they did variations of a logo for the different sports in the B10, then I would say Choi's would be a great option for football, but I don't think it's general enough to be the logo for the conference logo as a whole.

Edit: Should have read a little further before responding. Didn't mean to steal any thunder from you, Jabberwock.

not derivative of the PAC 10, nor infringing near the B10 network's copyrights.

It might look MOSTLY like football laces, but I also saw them as shoe laces, which pretty much includes all sports, regardless of gender (sorry water polo). Maybe they could be little research test tubes as well. It probably needs a bit more polish, but "all of the above" are still an improvement over the festering sore that is our current reality.

What about putting the school colors in each one of the "laces"? That way it wouldn't look like football laces or shoe laces but little strips to represent each school. I guess it might be cheesy but I'm guessing Choi could make it look pretty spiffy.